Not long ago, I used to run an entertainment review site that commented on television, movies, and PC games. That site was a lot of fun but has been retired just about a year now. Maybe someday the site will be resurrected as it was very popular due tot he subject matter. Anyway, I was watching a movie the other night that had such bad hacking ‘skills’ displayed that it was laughable. I thought that it would be a great idea for a post on my now defunct movie site but then I remembered that I could just post it here! So with that said I present to you my list of the best and worst hacking films of all time!

Best

Wargames (1983): The top of the list! What can you say about this movie other than marvel at it’s greatness. What’s that you say? You’re not convinced it’s the best… well then your probably under 40. For those of us that were around during that time, the accuracy of the equipment and methods used were 100% spot on. It completely represented the aura of the time. If you buy the DVD that has the director’s comments, you’ll find that they purposely used a hodgepodge of older computer equipment so it would accurately represent what a teenager would be able to afford or scrounge up during that time. Incredible accuracy, especially the part showing how to jack a pay telephone with a soda can pull tab. What’s a pull tab? Go away kid, ya bother me!

Tron (1982): Even though this film came out in the 80’s, it feels like a late 70’s film. I don’t know why. Basically it’s about a hacker that is transported into the digital universe inside a computer, and must survive combat as a cyber gladiator in order to stop the villainous Master Control. It wanes a little in places, but make no mistake this was a groundbreaking adventure at the time. The graphics, while dated now, were extremely cutting edge at the time and wowed movie audiences lucky enough to see it on the big screen.

Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999): Not so much a hacking film as a corporate espionage film… involving computer companies. Fantastic tale from start to finish. My only gripe is that it does leave out some key information. For instance, the only reason Bill Gates got in to see the higher up’s at IBM was that his mother served on the same board of directors for a charity that the IBM chairman served on. She got the wheels rolling on the meeting. It also makes Bill Gates out to be some rebellious drop out who risked everything to start his company. Truth is, Bill was a multi millionaire by the time he went to college thanks to a generous trust fund from his grandparents and parents, who were also very wealthy. So was Paul Allen, who knew Bill from their grade school days at one the most exclusive and expensive private schools in Seattle. They weren’t hurting for anything… unlike Jobs and Wozniak. Still the historical bend of this movie makes it one of the best biopic films for computer nostalgia nerds.

Worst

Sneakers (1992): Some of the hacking was OK, but the social commentary peppered throughout by Robert Redford made this film unwatchable. If you want to blame Republicans for everything, watch a Michael Moore movie. If you want to make a hacking movie, leave your left wing garbage out and just make a damn hacking film. Is that too much to ask there, Bobby? The story revolves around two college buddies who take different paths in life. One becomes an “ethical” hacker, and the other...well, he is not quite so noble, although rich. The underlying message is that capitalist greed is bad but being broke, running from the FBI, and working in a run down, abandoned warehouse is morally superior. Some great plot twists and comic scenes ruined by over the top political grandstanding make this a movie I would only watch if it were free… and beer was free.

The Net (1995): Ugh. The only saving grace of this movie is Sandra Bullock. Technology at that time was emerging at a great pace. This thing called ‘Internet’ was finally taking off and the filmmakers and writers took a lot of poetic justice to portray what they thought computers might be able to do in the 2 months between shooting the movie and releasing it. It had it’s moments but the whininess of Bullock and the whole portrayal of the security software hack made it almost unwatchable. A good MST3K candidate.

Swordfish (2001): This movie’s tagline should tell you just how unrealistic the hacking is: "Log on. Hack in. Go anywhere. Steal everything." Yeah, it’s that easy. If you watch the movie, you'll realize that's exactly what the filmmakers believe. John Travolta is a villain who’s grand scheme is to steal billions from the U.S. government through, you guessed it… hacking. The entire premise of the plot is that in the vast, computerized world of modern finance, $9.5 billion could slip through the cracks so that a clever hacker could, with hacking, transfer it to his own account unnoticed. Heck, I could use a new car… I’m gonna hack a few grand right now using my Hollywood generated CGI screens with 3d hacking tools where the mouse moves even though your hands are busy typing! It might have fooled the unwashed masses, but we know better.

Well, it took a little pushing for Al to give his blessing, but Dr. Torgo’s PC System Inventory tool was finally released today! This tool is great for PC Technicians and IT Departments that need quick access to detailed system information to assist in troubleshooting, software inventory, and software licensing.

Dr. Torgo's PC System Inventory offers a full range of system query options and powerful reporting tools. This software quickly generates reports on several dozen hives of system information including disks, CPU, memory, motherboard, users, ports, services, software, and MORE.

Dr. Torgo's PC System Inventory is a detailed query tool that allows users to get information about their systems like never before. The depth of the search option trees is amazing, and the detailed listing of installed software is perfect for tracking your software license compliance. This software is so detailed, it's nearly impossible to list all of the query trees and options. High level tabs include:

It also offers an export feature that allows you to save your inventory results to a variety of formats including HTML, CSV, Plain Text, or TAB delimited. Click HERE to see a sample report

Don't pay hundreds of dollars for those "one-click" PC troubleshooters that give vague information on only the simplest of problems. Let Dr. Torgo's PC System Inventory show you information so detailed that researching things like driver version, software revisions, and BIOS revisions are a snap! We now offer a 3 day trial version which lets you try before you buy!

NOTE: Torgo is a fictional character in the movie Manos: The Hands of Fate, played by John Reynolds. The quaver-voiced, maladroit satyr servant of "The Master", Torgo is charged with looking after the lodge while the Master is away. Torgo rose to pop culture notability following the Mystery Science Theater 3000 airing of Manos on January 30, 1993, following which he was featured on the television series as a recurring character. Now, the character is immortalized in eSource Development software.

This post is in relation to a story I received from eSecurity Planet. I know Microsoft usually releases their fixes on the Tuesday schedule, but for some reason Microsoft is making a bigger deal than usual about this patch release.

Microsoft notified IT security administrators this week that it plans to release ten patches, three of them rated "critical," on Tuesday.

That will likely mean a little more work to install and test June's Patch Tuesday fixes than last month, when Microsoft released only two critical patches. Microsoft releases most of its software patches on the second Tuesday of each month -- thus the term "Patch Tuesday."

The past two months have seen fewer fixes than usual. For instance, in April, Microsoft rolled out five fixes for a total of nine critical security vulnerabilities.

In February, however, Microsoft came close to breaking its all-time record of fixes in one Patch Tuesday release when it shipped 13 patches for 26 vulnerabilities. In that mammoth release, only five of the patches were rated "critical," which is Microsoft's highest severity rating.

In order to give IT administrators some warning of how much work they face when a new batch of patches comes out, Microsoft releases an advance notification on the Thursday before Patch Tuesday.

The three critical patches for June primarily affect Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. However, one or more of them also critically affect some server versions of Windows, including Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2) and Windows Server 2008 SP2 for both 32-bit and 64-bit editions, according to the advance notification e-mail.

Most of the other patches, which range from "important" to "moderate" in severity, impact Microsoft Office XP, Office 2003 and Office 2007. The just-released Office 2010 is not listed as affected.

A few years ago, eSource Development created a software pack that contained popular free virus and spyware programs, but also included a neat little system inventory program written in house. Since our service center closed, we stopped supporting or updating the starter pack program and let it fall into the ‘abandonware’ category.

Well, we decided to pull it out of the time capsule and give it a new face for Windows Vista and Windows7. The new Dr. Torgo’s System Inventory program will give comprehensive and in depth system information. It is an advanced System Information tool that gathers detailed information about your system properties and settings and displays it in an extremely comprehensible manner.

Dr. Torgo’s System Inventory can create a report file (CSV, HTML, TXT or XML), and is able to run in batch mode (for Computer Software and Hardware Inventory, Asset Inventory Tracking, Audit Software Licenses, Software License Compliance).

Look for it soon. The program will sell for $49, but you can get an early bird coupon worth $20 off. That means you get Dr. Torgo’s System Inventory for only $29. Now that’s something the Master would approve of (it’s a reference to the movie from which Torgo originated).

It’s time once again, young-ins, to gather around the campfire and I, an eSource tribal elder, will once again mesmerize you with tales passed down from Sysadmin to Sysadmin. For these are the continuing tales of the life force we call Internet spoken by those who were there to experience it many moons ago… (cue howling wolf).

This hack had a good run in the early to mid 90’s and is seen occasionally in this day and age in the dial up world. It had to do with luring someone to a page that interested them and getting them to click on a particular script… Not for a mere few cents in booty like Google AdWords pays today, I’m talking 99 cents per minute level booty!

During the heyday of dial up internet, people got accustomed to hearing that familiar dial tone, beeping, and subsequent squeal of the answering modem as they connected to the Internet via their local ISP. Hearing that sequence of events squawk through the speakers meant we were connected and ready to surf. Some users, though, elected to silence their modems and rely on the primitive Windows 95 icon to tell them they were connected.

Now, in the early days of Windows 95, Winsock Dialer was the method used to connect to dial up ISP’s. It was not initially part of Windows and had to be installed via a floppy disk (which ISP’s provided free of charge). These disks usually included the dialer and modem script with commands that were sent to the modem telling it what to do. It is in this script that astute users could send commands to the modem to tell it to dial quietly. Other commands in the modem initialization string could serve other functions, but the speaker and sound related ones were usually limited to:

M0  Speaker always off
M1  Speaker on during connection
M2  Speaker always on (very noisy)
L0  Lowest volume
L1  Lowest volume (redundant)
L2  Medium volume
L3  Maximum volume

And so on. The point is that a text based initialization file was all that was needed by Winsock (and other dialers) to get your modem to connect to your ISP. And it was this security hole that nefarious Internet underlings exploited to rake in millions from unsuspecting dupes. Here’s how…

Two VERY popular (and still popular) niches of the Internet are pornography and free (illegally) software. Newsgroups were the method of the day, but websites were starting to appear that offered “FREE” content and thousands of pictures, software, etc.. When people would visit these sites, they were told that in order to access their “FREE” content, they had to download some files or even download and run a program that would “set up” their computer to get the free material anonymously, faster, whatever it took to get the person to agree.

Once downloaded and run, the script would actually change the dialer settings of the Winsock script to dial an ISP with a 900 number, and also change the speaker settings on the modem. Once loaded, the script was executed which basically told the modem to hang up and reconnect. The sound of the modem disconnecting is usually a very faint clicking noise. If unnoticed, the unsuspecting web surfer’s connection was disabled and re-established using this silent pay-by-minute 900 number instead of their usual ISP. Some astute people would hear the disconnect click and suspect foul play, others though were a trustworthy bunch that, since the modem dialed silently, had no idea they were connecting to high priced dial in service.

The user was then taken to the site which, as promised, delivered endless hours of viewing pleasure to the unsuspecting client… until the phone bill came! In those days, disputes on the bills were not usually tolerated by the phone companies, so the client paid the phone bill, in turn paying the hackers. If they were not clever enough to figure the time frames, the blame sometimes fell on unsuspecting teenagers in the family that were blamed for countless hours on Corey Feldman party lines.

Now, off to bed ya go! The Elder’s will regale you with tales of Internet old some other time!

I’ll have to admit that when I first saw this I thought it was incredible. It’s like the huge touch screens of Star Trek TNG. I’m an old school Dungeons and Dragons player from days of old (late 70’s, early 80’s). There are still factions that meet at community gaming centers and stores that still play the old fashioned way with miniatures, maps, paper and pencil. But will this concept change that?

Surfacescapes Demo Walkthrough from Surfacescapes on Vimeo.

The big advantage of the large surface game is that specifics, ranges, inventories, etc. can all be accessed with the touch of a finger. Pretty cool, right? Well, I would have to argue that while it may appeal to the ‘shiny object’ crowd, the old school methods will still be the dominant ones. Why? For the simple reason that having to reference the mountains of books to determine, in the most precise of detail, the effects or abilities of a class, spell, or Boss is half the fun. The research and interpretation is where the fulfillment of D&D lies… That and the imagination!

Now I’ve been tabletop RPG’ing since High School and I can tell you that some of the cerebral fulfillment of the games comes from outsmarting an opponent who doesn’t know the rules as they pertain to their situation or has misinterpreted them, which usually leads to a half hour of looking up the ruling in question and arguing with the DM to get your way. Sometimes, a slap-fight ensues. With the surface method, everything is at your fingertips. You can immediately assess the situation and have the game determine the best option.

Take for example the simple method of range determination as demonstrated in the video. Have you ever played a tabletop RPG and pre-measured a range attack? OMG – You will be banned from the store quicker than your Manna burn rate can be calculated. Not physically banned, but the shame you feel for being labeled and ignored by your fellow type A mouth breathers might as well mean exile. There are rules, protocols, and sometimes rituals that accompany these games, and there’s good reason for it. It’s the interaction with fellow carbon based life forms that makes playing D&D and every other RPG (Games Workshop, etc.) worth while.

I can see this method being useful when your playing a single player game like Diablo or the many other solo RPG’s out there. I think the surface method would be a fantastic vehicle for those types of games where the pomp and circumstance of the group environment are not required. Plus, lugging around those 18 books is the only exercise I get!

In late January, Apple announced the iPad. Essentially it’s a jumbo sized iTouch (approximately 9.5” X 7.5”). Some of the features touted by Apple regarding the iPad are a 10 hour battery life, a solid state drive (16GB up to 32GB), all the multimedia you should need, and the ability to read eBooks. One of the neatest things to me was the ability to dock with a regular keyboard and the ability to run iPhone applications! Sounds like a winner so far, and since it’s an Apple product, I’m sure they will sell millions.

The iPad is beautiful, like all Apple products. It looks like an HD LCD TV with the black border and shiny high gloss screen. Which brings me to the first possible problem…

The iPad is slightly smaller than a standard sheet of notebook paper. Laptops, while smaller now, have similar type screens but are sometimes chided for their clamshell design keyboard / screen mechanics. iTouch devices are nice and small and fit in your shirt pocket. This helps eliminate possible scratches to the screen. The other hidden purpose of a laptop’s clamshell design is to help protect the screen since it cannot be easily placed in a protective pocket. I think the iPad will suffer a bit in that the screen is exposed. One scratch and you’ve not only ruined the aesthetics, you’ve just incurred a few hundred dollars in screen replacement cost.

In 2002/2003, Windows toyed with the idea of a tablet PC. It was marketed as being more convenient than a laptop for quick startup and retrieval of information on the go. One thing the iPad has going for it is a touch screen. The tablet PC’s of old required a stylus (but cut them some slack… it was 8 years ago). I’ve read a couple of posts from Apple groupies comparing it to the Windows Tablet PC’s, but they fail to acknowledge that they are in reality comparing Apples to Oranges… or Windows. 8 years of technological growth have no doubt made the iPad a vast improvement over the tablet PC’s.

One problem I’ve had with Apple over the years is their distrustful licensing model. They assume everyone is out to rip them off so they clamp their product access down with a jackhammer. All applications on the iPad come from the App Store, which means that before you use them, a series of complex and secure communications must happen between your device and your App store account. In my opinion, this is where the iPad falls way short of a traditional laptop.

Window will  have another go at the tablet market in 2013 when it releases it’s new device. Google will also be releasing it’s Chrome OS and a tablet like device. One of the big hurdles that Google has overcome in marketing it’s iPhone comparable phone is price. Google’s product, by comparison, is cheaper, and that’s driving sales.

I wonder if Apple will pull the same old price switch-aroo it did with the first iPhones? They were cut by $100 within a few weeks of release, which angered some initial iPhone enthusiasts who stood in long lines and forked over their hard earned money for Apple’s latest must have device. But, I’m sure the throngs of loyal Apple groupies will make this launch a huge success. Good luck fitting it in your shirt pocket!

There are times when I tell someone much younger than me about some of the trials and tribulations of early Internet life.  You know… before DSL and cable modems, before Wi-Fi, before DVD’s. Sometimes they look at me like I was making all of it up just to amuse myself.

Let me start with a little background. I have been a Software Engineer for almost 25 years. I have had many titles and worked for all sized companies, from fortune 100 to mom-and-pop. I was around when the Internet ‘happened’. When this weird, wonderful technological gift was bestowed upon humanity. I’m also old enough to know, for a FACT, that Al Gore did NOT invent the Internet. Ah, those glorious days of my youth, watching as computers progressed from 286 to 386 to Pentium… Watching as hard drives fell in price from a $695 10MB drive to a $60 1TB drive. But I digress.

Such was my early involvement with the Internet that I hold the dubious distinction of building and installing the first Internet accessible dial-in server at the University of Phoenix for student communication. Prior to that they had to use a dial in Bulletin Board system called ALEx (Apollo Learning Exchange). I left there in ‘95 to dedicate my efforts to Internet related activities and joined up with a man who wanted to start his own dial-up ISP. It reached it’s limit at about 1000 subscribers and was giving Primenet (our biggest local competitor) a run for their money. So, with that said, I believe I am pretty well qualified to speak on the historical events and their significance / relevance, peppered with a little humor, sarcasm, and embellishment.

Thus was born the thread Hacking it: Old Skool. Here I will chronicle some of the pitfalls, surprises, achievements, and flat out failures of various Internet activities. So gather around the campfire and I, the eSource tribal elder, will mesmerize you with tales passed down from Sysadmin to Sysadmin. These are the tales of the life force we call Internet spoken by those who were there to experience it many moons ago… (cue howling wolf).

This first article deals with early attempts at email blast marketing and how the perpetrators would hide their tracks. Remember that in the early days of the Internet, our email programs were barely GUI. They had none of the features you kids enjoy today like spam filters (at least ones that worked) or embedded HTML. They were TEXT with simple links and limited styling. Pornography was a budding business back then and people were looking for ways to get people to click to their site thinking they were clicking on something else. Hopefully the person who clicked was A) A guy, B) Looking for porn anyway, and C) Too unfamiliar with the early browsers to release themselves from the shackles of the endless redirect!

Knowing their dial-up ISP would delete their account if they got complaints against them sending such material, they looked for ingenious ways to send emails, make them look like they are from someone else, and completely wash their hands of them. One such technique was called “The Gullible Server.”

In those early days, ISP’s were generally small shops that, as a group, looked out for each other and tried to help out as needed. There were many servers that had security holes, either by choice or incompetence, that left the door wide open to those looking to take advantage of their kindness.

The Gullible Server involved finding an ISP whose SMTP server had lax security / checking. The email marketer would then create their email with fraudulent or unreliable links and create an email list of recipients. Then the following would occur:

1) The FROM address would be the actual address of the intended recipient

2) The TO address would be a bogus address at the domain server they were spamming through (say Fake_Address@nowhere.com)

3) When the email reached the Gullible Server, it tried to deliver it to the bogus address on their server. It would not be found

4) Trying to be nice, the Gullible Server would send the email back to the FROM address to let them know it was undeliverable

5) The user listed in the FROM address receives the email and the nefarious email scammer’s plan is put in action

6) Some angry users call nowhere.com and complain about receiving offensive unsolicited emails

7) Clueless admin scratches his head trying to find the user Fake_Address@nowhere.com… No luck

If the admin waited more than a couple of days to check the logs and see what user actually sent the email, they were most likely gone or simply did not exist (the logs, not the user). Remember that drive space was at a premium, so keeping long term records on small capacity HD’s was not a priority or a necessity for small, independent ISP’s.

The scam had several variations as different filters and methods were developed for the email servers to combat this sort of thing. For those early hacking pioneers it netted them some benefit and riches. As the popularity of the Internet grew and ISP’s began having to fight and claw to hold on to their customers, the locks got even tighter and eventually this type of email spamming became a thing of the past.

Now, off to bed you little scamps! I’ll regale you with further tales of Internet past some other time! 

I have been using Windows 7 (both BETA and RC version) for several months now on a test machine. I purchased a full copy of Windows 7 over the Christmas break so that I could upgrade my development desktop from Vista and keep it current. Let’s just say the upgrade was less than spectacular.

I had a 32 bit version of Vista but noticed I had 2 DVD’s in my Windows 7 packet… One was 32 bit the other was 64 bit. I thought since I recently upgraded to a dual core Intel I would take advantage of the 64 bit now available to me. Without warning or hesitation, the installation started in a flash but then soon bogged down into a quagmire. After waiting over 6 hours for files to copy, the screen showed it was only 12% done. Something was clearly wrong.

I aborted the upgrade and attempted to boot into the remaining scraps of Vista that may still be lurking. No luck. The install had wiped it too clean on the Vista side and only installed 20% on the Windows 7 side.

After much investigation I found that you cannot upgrade from 32 bit Vista to 64 bit Windows 7. Thanks for telling me! Some kind of warning or denial screen would have been nice. Luckily I backed up everything and had to proceed with a complete re-installation of Windows 7… Which isn’t a bad thing. It’s always best to start with a clean slate, but I have SO much software, dev tools, add-ons, and utilities that it took a day and a half to install them all.

So be warned that even though your fresh new packet of Windows 7 comes with both versions, you can only upgrade to a version you currently have installed. I wonder how Windows 8 with 128 bit support will handle updates?

No, it does not bring up a picture of Bill Gates. What is does, though, is brings up a fantastic little shortcut to all the features that you now have to hunt around for in order to find them. BTW, what happened to ‘network repair’ in Windows7… I can’t find it anywhere.

Credit CNET with this one:

Although its name suggests perhaps even grander capabilities, Windows enthusiasts are excited over the discovery of a hidden "GodMode" feature that lets users access all of the operating system's control panels from within a single folder.

 

By creating a new folder in Windows 7 and renaming it with a certain text string at the end, users are able to have a single place to do everything from changing the look of the mouse pointer to making a new hard-drive partition.

 

The trick is also said to work in Windows Vista, although some are warning that although it works fine in 32-bit versions of Vista, it can cause 64-bit versions of that operating system to crash.

 

To enter "GodMode," one need only create a new folder and then rename the folder to the following:

 

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

 

Once that is done, the folder's icon will change to resemble a control panel and will contain dozens of control options. I'm not sure it's my idea of playing God, but it is a handy way to get to all kinds of controls.

I've asked Microsoft for more details on the feature and how it came to be. But so far, Redmond is silent on the topic.